Song of the Week #7 – “Eternal” by Holly Herndon
One of the most iconic sequences in Mamoru Oshii’s landmark 1995 anime film Ghost in the Shell is its opening credits. (Warning: NSFW).
We open on an image of a machine, humanoid in appearance, with its head opened up. An object – which we are told visually is a self-contained device containing a living human brain – is placed in the machine’s head, and its head closes. We are witnessing a sort of rebirth; a human being undergoing full “cyberisation”, as Masamune Shirow refers to it in the original manga. A sequence follows depicting the machine going through a series of transformations; the machine is baptised in a milky fluid which peels away to reveal artificial skin, and the machine slowly begins to resemble a living, organic human being. The sequence ends with the revelation that the cyberised person is, in fact, our protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi – once merely human, and now somewhere between human and machine.
Unlike most science fiction, which depicts the process of becoming a cyborg as painful, dehumanising, an intrusion of metal on flesh, the sequence depicts the process of becoming a cyborg as a spiritual, almost religious transformative ritual – a baptism and a rebirth of sorts. It is no coincidence that we are shown images of Motoko’s body spinning in the foetal position and then literally raised, naked, through a cavity. The Major’s transformation is not painful or dehumanising, as with other cyborg characters like Star Wars’s Darth Vader or the titular character from RoboCop, but instead it is treated as a sort of metaphysical rebirth; a becoming.
The sequence is soundtracked by a piece by Kenji Kawai, titled “Making of Cyborg”. It uses traditional Japanese instrumentation as well as lyrics in ancient Japanese, giving it an ancient, mystical quality while also sounding intensely futuristic.
The “Making of Cyborg” sequence came to mind several times when I listened to Holly Herndon’s Proto (2019), out now on 4AD.
I first became aware of Herndon’s work on a visit to Rough Trade East, a record shop based in Tower Hamlets in London, with two friends. A piece began playing through the shop’s speakers, a bizarre mixture of percussive vocal sounds not unlike “beatboxing”, and strange, inhuman vocalisations. My friend said that they had heard the piece before, and that it was an AI that had been taught to “beatbox”. Immediately I found the piece disturbing, and yet somehow alluring. I immediately said to my friends that the piece had sent me straight to the uncanny valley – Masahiro Mori’s term for something artificial that too closely resembles a human being, like an android. The piece is very clearly constructed out of samples of a human voice, but sounds just inhuman enough to seem immediately “wrong”, like a perversion. While the piece had made me shudder, I immediately set about looking for it on the Internet when I got home, and was immediately introduced to Holly Herndon.
I bought her album almost immediately.
The piece is called “Godmother”, and it appears near the end of Proto. It was made using an artificial intelligence (or AI) housed in a gaming PC and referred to as “Spawn”, though Herndon refers to “Spawn” as her “AI baby”. The entire album was made using “Spawn”, which processes vocals live. The result is something both familiar and alien – the very definition of uncanny.
Throughout the album Herndon’s “AI baby” squeaks, burbles, burps, hiccups, moans, wails and chatters – one track, “Bridge”, shows how the AI responds to conversational human speech, while “Evening Shades (Live Training)” is a sort of call-and-response where Herndon and an ensemble sing a series of short phrases, to which the AI attempts to respond in kind, with varying degrees of success. Especially unnerving is “Extreme Love”, which features a child’s voice cheerfully describing how human individuality is an illusion, over AI-processed “sighing” vocals.
The album’s highlight track, however, is “Eternal”, which is probably the closest thing the album has to a “pop song”. It opens with women’s voices wailing, followed by a beat that resembles the sort of “drop” anyone who has ever listened to Top 40 radio in the last ten years will recognise, and the track swells into an ethereal meditation on the nature of love, as vocals swirl and shimmer in and around each other, as though motes of dust caught in a sunbeam, emerging and dissolving, discordant moans and wails slipping out from behind gorgeous, glittering melodies.
Much like Kawai’s “Making of Cyborg”, “Eternal” – and much of the album at large – sounds simultaneously like ancient folk music, and also like the music of the future; “Eternal” is electrifying in that many of the vocals and beats are things we are familiar with, but arranged in ways that seem new and fascinating.
It is not often that I hear a track and think “This is what music will sound like in the future”.
I have long held that, as artificial intelligence becomes more competent and processing power gets cheaper, it will slowly begin to be used for artistic and creative purposes; perhaps even supplanting a lot of popular music and literature by simply writing according to trends, drawn directly from figures based on what is most popular in the charts. Proto feels like the first whisper of this idea, a sort of blueprint for the future.
Herndon herself has stated that the album is intended to make technology seem less “dehumanising”, which brings me back to the title sequence from Ghost in the Shell, which is also intended, in its own way, to make technology seem less “dehumanising”. Proto feels like a tacit acknowledgement of humanity’s status as a “cyborg” species – so deeply entwined with technology that it is perhaps our defining trait as a species; that we create physical objects as extensions of our bodies – as Marshall McLuhan famously put it in The Medium is the Massage (1967): “The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system.”
Perhaps we so often depict “cyberisation” (to borrow Masamune’s terminology) as “dehumanising” in our science fiction because we fear the intrusion of the mechanical on flesh; we depict technology penetrating and corrupting the flesh, sullying our purity. Yet, technology does not need to penetrate our physical bodies in order to intertwine with our being. Nearly all of us carry around devices in our pockets that are more or less a form of artificial telepathy, able to divine almost any information and communicate almost instantaneously in a way that would have seemed like magic even a century and a half ago.
Perhaps this is the point that Herndon is trying to make; that we live as symbiotically with our technology as we do with the bacteria that live in our guts (as the cheerful child observes on “Extreme Love”). The album has a remarkably optimistic outlook on technology, but also contains hints; warnings of the future that could come to pass if we become careless – “a frontier of green or of dust”, as she puts it in “Frontier” – but that if we learn to embrace technology, and to embrace what Donna Haraway, author of the Cyborg Manifesto (1985) called the “fourth wound to human narcissism”1 – namely that “our machines are lively too,” as Haraway put it in a 2006 interview with Nicholas Gane in Theory, Culture & Society (Vol 23, Issue 7-8) – then we can “step into the light”, and perhaps even evolve into something greater.
Never has an album left me this deep in thought. If you like the philosophy of technology, or you’re just looking for some unnerving but deeply satisfying folk music tinged with electronica and world music, then listen to “Eternal”, and there’s plenty more where that came from on Proto, out now on 4AD, which is available to purchase from Bleep. (This post is not sponsored; I am genuinely just that enamoured with this record that I feel everyone should listen to it.)
And, hey, if it finally stops those cartoonists who keep drawing pictures of mobile phones turning people into mindless zombies, that’s an added bonus…
1: After Jacques Derrida’s first “three wounds” – the Copernican; in which we became aware we were not the centre of the Universe; the Darwinian; in which we became aware we were not created in God’s image, but rather evolved by fluke from a succession of creatures, and are still evolving; and the Freudian; in which we became aware that our ‘reason’ is not absolute and that we are just as susceptible to base, animalistic impulse as any creature.